Daisy’s Reviews > How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer > Status Update
Daisy
is on page 157 of 525
Whenever Montaigne sounds cool or detached from other people, as he sometimes does, one has to remember La Boétie. People should not, he writes, be ‘joined and glued to us so strongly that they cannot be detached without tearing off our skin and some part of our flesh as well’.
— Apr 15, 2023 12:40PM
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Daisy
is on page 384 of 525
‘We are all patchwork,’ he wrote, ‘and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.’ No overall point of view existed from which he could look back and construct the one consistent Montaigne that he would have liked to be.
— Jul 02, 2023 01:26PM
Daisy
is on page 378 of 525
On one of the rare occasions when Montaigne referred to himself as a philosopher at all, it was to say that it happened only by chance: he was an ‘unpremeditated and accidental philosopher’.
— Jun 29, 2023 08:26PM
Daisy
is on page 362 of 525
His letter to Henri IV shows that he was as good as his word. Indeed, he comes across in both letters exactly as he does in the Essays: blunt, unimpressed by power, and determined to preserve his freedom.
— Jun 28, 2023 09:10PM
Daisy
is on page 294 of 525
In a letter to a friend, he ( Zweig) wrote: ‘the similarity of his epoch and situation to ours is astonishing. I am not writing a biography; I propose simply to present as an example his fight for interior freedom.’ In the essay itself, he admitted: ‘In this brothership of fate, for me Montaigne has become the indispensable helper, confidant and friend.’
— Jun 25, 2023 12:55PM
Daisy
is on page 280 of 525
“West and Freud both had experience of war, and so did Montaigne: he could hardly fail to notice this side of humanity. His passages about moderation and mediocrity must be read with one eye always to the French civil wars, in which transcendental extremism brought about subhuman cruelties on an overwhelming scale.”
— Jun 25, 2023 11:50AM
Daisy
is on page 268 of 525
He (the poet Alphonse de Lamartine )explained to a correspondent that he had only been able to love the Essays when he was young – that is, about nine months earlier, when he first began to enthuse about the book in his letters. Now, at twenty-one, he had been weathered by pain, and found Montaigne too cool and measured.
— Jun 25, 2023 10:53AM
Daisy
is on page 246 of 525
Among less emotionally wrought readers, one much affected by Montaigne’s remarks on cruelty was Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf. In his memoirs, he held up Montaigne’s ‘On Cruelty’ as a much more significant essay than people had realised. Montaigne, he wrote, was ‘the first person in the world to express this intense, personal horror of cruelty. He was, too, the first completely modern man.’
— Jun 24, 2023 11:49AM
Daisy
is on page 246 of 525
I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time.
— Jun 24, 2023 11:48AM
Daisy
is on page 212 of 525
Pyrrhonians accordingly deal with all the problems life can throw at them by means of a single word which acts as shorthand for this manoeuvre: in Greek, epokhe. It means ‘I suspend judgement’. Or, in a different rendition given in French by Montaigne himself, je soutiens: ‘I hold back.’This phrase conquers all enemies; it undoes them, so that they disintegrate into atoms before your eyes.
— Apr 17, 2023 07:39PM
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Apr 15, 2023 12:40PM
These are the words of a man who knows what it feels like to be flayed in this way.
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With La Boétie safely dead, Montaigne could surrender to him unreservedly – and he could do what La Boétie31 had begged him to do: give him a place. First he absorbed many of La Boétie’s books into his library, making room for his friend among his own most treasured possessions. Then he wrote about La Boétie’s death, rescuing as much as he could remember of the young philosopher’s testament to posterity. He prepared a stack of La Boétie’s writings for publication. Finally, when he retired, he made his friend the guiding spirit of his own new career. Alongside the main inscription about his retirement, he added another to his library wall: it is now worn and hard to decipher, but seems to consecrate all his future ‘studious work’ to the memory of La Boétie, ‘the sweetest, dearest, and most intimate friend’ the sixteenth century could produce. La Boétie was to watch over everything Montaigne did in his library: he would be his literary guardian angel.
By dying, La Boétie changed from being Montaigne’s real-life, flawed companion to being an ideal entity under Montaigne’s control. He became less a person than a sort of philosophical technique.
By passing on La Boétie’s death narrative and farewell to the world in written form, he helped himself to relive the scene, and thus outlive it. He never fully got over La Boétie, but he learned to exist in the world without him, and, in so doing, to change his own life. Writing about La Boétie eventually led him to write the Essays: the best philosophical trick of all.
